Yehudit Feinstein is an artist whose practice centers on listening to the body, to memory, and to what emerges when certainty is released. Working primarily in large-scale drawing, painting, and mixed media, her work explores how inherited histories live not as stories, but as sensations, gestures, and repetitions carried through the body.

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Her process begins without a fixed image or narrative. Instead, it unfolds through attention, movement, and material engagement. Drawing becomes a space where the hand leads before meaning arrives, and where memory is allowed to surface slowly, without being explained or resolved. Through repetition, restriction, and sustained presence, the work holds tension between control and trust, loss and renewal, what is known and what remains open.

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Feinstein draws from fragments of personal and collective history, including family artifacts, textiles, domestic objects, and traces of European and Middle Eastern pasts shaped by immigration, war, and survival. These elements do not appear as illustrations, but as pressures, patterns, and visual rhythms. Memory, in her work, is not something retrieved. It is something that moves, shifts, and transforms through the act of making.

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Central to her practice is the belief that the body holds knowledge the mind has not yet named. The studio becomes a site of discovery rather than mastery, where mistakes, repetition, and slowness create conditions for attention and care. Healing, in this context, is not understood as erasing pain, but as re-creation. It is the possibility of movement where something was once frozen, and of holding beauty and difficulty in the same gesture.

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In parallel with her studio practice, Feinstein teaches and facilitates individuals and groups. Her Brooklyn studio functions as a shared space where people are invited to work without knowing, to slow down, and to reconnect with their own sensory and creative intelligence. Rather than guiding participants toward meaning, she holds space for listening, allowing personal narratives to re-form organically through process.

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Across her work, Feinstein returns to questions of belonging, not as a fixed destination, but as an ongoing practice. Living between cultures, languages, and histories, she understands belonging as something continuously created through attention, ritual, and the courage to remain present within uncertainty. Her work invites viewers to sense what memory carries, and to recognize that this capacity for listening and meaning-making belongs to all of us.

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Yehudit Feinstein Mentesh graduated with honors from the School of Visual Arts in 2003 with a BFA and from the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in 2007 with an MA.

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Bio

 

Artist Residency:

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2006 BIMA, Summer Program, Williams College

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Select Exhibitions:

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2024 Jerusalem Biennale, Jerusalem Museum of Art, Israel 

2023  Home Away From Home, Laurie M. Tisch Gallery, New York City

2019 Inside out, Group Show, Elizabeth Sutton Gallery, New York City

2018 Nostrand/Brooklyn Gallery, Group Show, Brooklyn, NY

2016 The Space In Between, TheEdgar M. Bronfman Center Gallery, Group Show, New York City

2015 Conversations, Irving Goldman Gallery, Group Show, Jersey City, NJ

2013 Marking time, Rotunda Gallery, Group Show, Jersey City, NJ

2012 Pale Green, Chacur Gallery, Group Show, New York City

2010 Reaction, DNA Gallery, Group Show, New York City

2009 Illuminations, 1581 Gallery, Group Show, Boston, MA